Resolutions

by Jane A. Adams

  ‘Yeah, well, it was two in the morning and we were making enough noise to wake the entire house.’

  ‘And I was only eight.’

  ‘Yeah, well, that too.’

  They both fell silent. It was just after their dad had come back, and George had seen first-hand just why his mum and his sister had dreaded his return. He’d been too young when his dad went to prison to recall what it had been like before.

  ‘That was the first time we ran away from him,’ he said.

  ‘Second,’ Karen told him. ‘You were a baby; you won’t remember.’

  ‘Karen, why didn’t she go away when he was in prison? Why didn’t she just take us and go somewhere else? We’d have been all right. Just the three of us. Karen, do you miss her?’

  Karen shook her head really sadly. ‘You know, I think that’s what hurts such a lot. I don’t. She was . . . well, she wasn’t like a mum; she was like someone else to take care of. George, I never knew what we’d be coming home to. If he’d be there, if she’d be . . . well. You know.’

  ‘I can’t believe she killed herself. We’d always been so careful. We always hid the pills, always made sure she couldn’t . . .’

  ‘I know,’ Karen said quietly. ‘That day, well, I guess I just didn’t hide them. I gave Mum her meds and then I left and . . . I guess she must have found the rest.’

  Something in the way she said it jarred on George’s consciousness. They’d talked about it so often: what would happen if their mum did succeed in one of her suicide attempts. She’d seemed so much better when they’d come to live in Frantham, even got a job. Then their dad had turned up again and everything had gone wrong.

  ‘Did you . . . Karen, did you leave the pills where she could find them?’

  For a minute he thought she was going to get mad with him or deny it, ask him how the hell he could even think such a thing. But she didn’t. Tears poured down carefully made-up cheeks, and George found himself thinking that the old Karen rarely wore any make-up apart from a little lip-gloss. ‘I didn’t think she’d do it, George. But I was sick of taking care, of being the adult, of having to think about every little thing. I left the flat and then I remembered I’d meant to put the pills in my bag and I’d not done it. I thought about going back and then . . . then I just couldn’t be bothered, if you want to know the truth. I just didn’t want to know any more. All I could think about was what was happening to you – and Mum, well, I guess she’d just dropped way down my list.’

  They fell silent, each immersed in their own thoughts. Then George asked, ‘How are you paying for all this stuff?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Oh, Karen, don’t do that, you know what I mean. The house, the clothes, the car—’

  ‘It’s a hire car.’

  ‘Yeah, but when did you learn to drive?’

  ‘I took lessons before I left, remember?’

  ‘Yeah, but, Karen, what are you doing? Do you have a job?’

  She laughed. ‘I work, if that’s what you’re asking. George, I’ve got this plan. There’s this little gallery – the woman who owns it, she’s retiring next year. We’ve talked and she’s going to be selling up. I want to buy, take over from her. George, it’ll be great, a proper home and a proper business.’

  ‘Paid for how?’

  She frowned. ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘Yes, it matters.’

  She laughed. ‘I don’t see why. What matters is us; what’s always mattered is us. Family. There’s just you and me now, just like it always was, really. Difference is, George, I can look after you properly now. We can have a proper life with a proper home and a real future. By the time she’s ready to sell next year, I’ll have more than enough put away to buy the gallery, keep everything going while we get established. She’ll be selling the business and the goodwill that goes with it, and it’s right on the promenade, so there’s all the passing trade in the summer.’

  ‘Karen, stop, please stop,’ George begged her. ‘Just tell me something.’

  ‘Anything.’

  ‘Are you . . . are you like our dad?’

  She stared at him. ‘I’m nothing like our dad. Our dad was a mean-minded thug. He hurt us, he hurt our mum; he lived to hurt people. How can you say that, George?’

  He took a deep breath. ‘I know what you did,’ he said quietly. ‘About Mark Dowling. Karen, how is that so different from the way our dad was?’

  She laughed then, actually laughed, and George, shocked and profoundly disturbed, did not know how to respond.

  ‘Is that all?’ Karen asked him. ‘Look, George, Mark Dowling was an arse, a prick, a . . . Mark Dowling deserved what he got. I have no remorse to spare for the likes of Mark Dowling, or our dad, for that matter. I wish I’d managed to kill the bastard way back. Trouble is, I suppose, it takes a bit of practice to get things right – a bit like you and that piano.’

  George felt his breath grow tight and thick in his lungs. ‘And have you practised since?’ he asked her. ‘Karen, I don’t want any of this. I want my big sister back, like it was before. I don’t want all this, this stuff. I just want ordinary.’

  She shook her head emphatically. ‘No, you don’t, Georgie, not really. That’s just other people telling you what you should want, claiming to have the moral high ground. But tell me this, Georgie, where was their moral high ground when our dad was beating the shit out of our mum, out of me, threatening you? Who helped us then?’

  ‘Rina helped us. Tim helped. Mac helped.’

  ‘Mac?’ She laughed again. ‘Look, I’ll grant that Rina and Tim stepped up when we needed them – Rina in ways I think she now regrets, but, anyway, I’ll grant you that. But Mac? No way. Let me tell you something, George. I called him when I knew our dad had snatched you. I called him, but did he come? Did he hell! He was out there doing some bloody TV appearance. You were gone – our dad had taken you away – and there he was, telling the world that they’d get whoever killed poor Markie baby, swearing he wouldn’t let the killer get away with it. Friend? Yeah, I thought he was, but twice he let us down.’

  ‘Twice?’

  ‘Came to arrest me, didn’t he?’

  ‘You’d already gone.’

  ‘Just as well, wasn’t it? George, Mac is the enemy. He might say all the right words and he might play nice when it suits him, but don’t think he gives a damn. Just don’t you ever think that.’

  George’s mind was in turmoil. He knew that Mac had come to arrest Karen, hadn’t really been surprised. He knew too that Mac had no choice, given what he’d figured out. That Mac had been absent at the precise moment his father had come for him was something George knew Mac regretted desperately – they had talked about it – but he also knew that no one can be in the right place at the right time all of the time. Should he say that to Karen? George decided it would be a waste of breath.

  ‘I want to stay here,’ he said as firmly as he could. ‘I don’t want to go with you. I don’t want to be a part of whatever it is you’re doing.’

  ‘You wouldn’t be. You think I want to involve you in . . . Oh George, I’m doing all of this for us. Like I told you, a year from now and we’ll have a house, a business, a way forward for both of us. You’ll finish school and maybe even do university. George, you’ve seen all those kids in care we met at hostels and homes and everywhere. Most of them would be lucky if they did anything with their lives. Thick, most of them. Had it all battered out of them. But not you and me. We’re different. We survived, George, and now I’m going to make damn sure we do more than just survive. I’m doing whatever it takes now, to make sure of that.’

  George stood up. ‘No,’ he said firmly and he saw it flash across his sister’s face, even as it crossed his own mind, that it was the first time he had refused her anything. A brief, bright burst of anger, soon gone, she stood too, hugged him again, but George sensed that this time the embrace was somehow possessive and territorial, not a simple expression of affection.

  �
��You’ll come round,’ she said confidently. ‘It’s all a bit much, isn’t it, our kid? I’m pushing a bit too hard. Right, I’ll be off for now, before Matthew offers me more cake – any more and I think I’ll explode.’ They returned to the rest of the company and Karen took her leave, laughing and joking again and telling the Peters sisters to make sure George kept up with the piano practice. George said nothing. He stood in the hallway until she had been waved off by the entire household.

  Rina started towards him, but Ursula got there first.

  ‘You OK?’

  ‘No, not really.’ He knew she wouldn’t pester him with questions. One thing he and Ursula definitely had in common, they liked to tell things in their own time, if at all. Their relationship, George thought, was as much about all the things they could safely leave unsaid as it was about telling.

  ‘We’d better get ready,’ Ursula said. ‘Our taxi will be here.’

  Rina nodded. ‘I’ll get your coats,’ she said. She looked anxiously at George and then at Ursula. Out of the tail of his eye, George saw Ursula shake her head. No questions now; just leave well alone. He was relieved to see that although Rina pursed her lips, clamping down on the very natural impulse to ask what Karen had said, she took Ursula’s lead. She was, perhaps, the only adult he had ever met who knew when to leave things alone.

  George took a deep breath, leaving it to Ursula to deal with the effusive farewells. He felt he ought to say something that was vaguely normal, but just couldn’t quite remember how. ‘How’s Mac?’ he managed as the taxi sounded its horn outside and Rina opened the front door.

  ‘He tells me he’s managing,’ Rina said.

  ‘I hope he’ll be all right.’

  Rina watched them as they opened the back doors of the car and scrambled inside. Vince, the usual driver from the local firm, waved at Rina and she waved back, standing on the doorstep until he drove away.

  ‘I hope we all will, George,’ Rina said.

  FOURTEEN

  It had been a frustrating afternoon, Mac thought. They had applied for the CCTV footage from the court on the day of Rains’s sentencing, but been told that it no longer existed. Recordings were kept for a month and then overwritten, which meant there was no way of actually verifying Rains’s story about Peel being in the public gallery that day. Mac was starting to think it had just been a wind-up, by Rains himself or suggested by Peel.

  Nothing useful either on Ricky Marlow. A request had been made for a warrant for his financial records and had so far met with resistance from the local judiciary. Marlow had powerful friends and a reputation for tough but honest dealing; additionally, officers had gone back and talked to the bar staff who’d been on that day, and had also met with a customer they identified as being a regular on Wednesday lunchtimes. He thought he remembered Peel from the photograph they showed him, definitely recalled ‘a bit of an altercation’ and that Marlow had asked a rather drunk customer to leave. Recalled that the man said he hadn’t finished his drink and that Marlow had offered a refund.

  ‘I remembered,’ he said, ‘because I was ready to tell Mr Marlow that the staff hadn’t served him above one drink, so he must have come in like that and the staff not noticed or whatever.’ Mr Marlow was, apparently, very hot on his staff not serving the overly inebriated and the customer had not wanted Sally, a new employee of Marlow’s and one the customer evidently admired, to find herself in trouble.

  ‘Interestingly,’ Alec told Mac, ‘both staff on duty that lunchtime insisted that Peel had seemed stone cold sober when he’d come in and he’d only had the one drink.’

  ‘Give the man an Oscar,’ Mac muttered. ‘So what’s left?’

  ‘John Bennet,’ Alec said. ‘We still need a word. He made a statement the day he reported seeing Peel. Time to see if he’s remembered anything more.’

  ‘Fat chance.’ Mac was inclined to be pessimistic. It was that sort of day.

  Alec laughed. ‘Almost certainly right,’ he agreed, ‘but best go through the motions, eh?’

  John Bennet lived on the outskirts of Pinsent on one of those bland 1970s estates that had sprung up just before the 1980s brought the building industry to its knees and shrank the size of new builds for ever. The houses on the Freelands estate were large and oblong and large-windowed, with grassy frontages and off-road parking, arranged in a curling mass of little cul-de-sacs that all seemed to be part of the same road.

  John Bennet’s house was in the third cul-de-sac they tried, found after they’d finally figured out that the numbers ran consecutively and not odd on one side and even on the other.

  It was dark and cold, and Mac was ready to pack up for the day, out of patience with himself, with Wildman, with the minutiae of an investigation he somehow had little faith in. He could not explain his mood or his depression; only that it wrapped his mind too much in memory, in a time that had already been fixed and a quest that had failed, miserably. He could not seem to convince himself that this time would be different. Maybe, he thought, he had just forgotten how tedious some police work could be. True, he had been assigned a posting in the back of beyond, but, even when major events had finally been persuaded to pass Frantham-on-Sea by and go and play elsewhere, he had not been bored. He had, unwittingly, become something of a neighbourhood policeman, part of the community, at home with a job that called upon him to take half an hour to walk the few hundred yards along the promenade, just because everyone stopped to talk to him, and where, should he pause to look out to sea, he might become involved in a deep discussion regarding the next day’s weather. He liked it; he was happy. Back in Pinsent, he was homesick and heartsick. ‘Do you ever think about giving it up?’ he asked Alec.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Police work.’ Mac stared vindictively at the semi-detached house they had now identified as John Bennet’s. ‘Seventies architecture,’ he said. ‘The decade of bland.’

  ‘We discussing ambition or architecture?’ Alec asked.

  ‘Neither. Both. I don’t know.’

  Alec waited, but Mac was done with talk. He got out of the car and walked up the rough concrete path to the red front door set between two large windows. A rubber plant took up most of the entrance hall.

  ‘Who the hell has rubber plants these days?’

  ‘People who consider the aspidistra old-fashioned?’ Alec suggested. He rang the bell, glanced anxiously at Mac. ‘I can handle this. Want to wait in the car?’

  ‘No, I’m fine. Just tired and . . .’

  ‘Jaundiced,’ Alec said.

  The inner door opened and John Bennet came out into the hall. He recognized Alec, stood back. ‘Go on through,’ he said. ‘Tea? Coffee? Millie, it’s Inspector Friedman and – sorry, I don’t think we’ve met.’

  ‘Inspector McGregor,’ Alec said, as though not trusting Mac to answer for himself. ‘Sorry to disturb your Saturday evening.’

  ‘Oh, not at all.’

  The inside of the house was pretty much as Mac had expected. A long lounge-diner with patio doors at the end leading out into the garden. Millie was closing the heavy curtains as they came in. She turned, smiling. Two little girls sat at the dining table. ‘The kids are just having their tea,’ she said. ‘Can I get you anything?’

  Mac declined; Alec said he would like a coffee if it wasn’t too much trouble. The room smelt of spaghetti hoops and tomato sauce, buttered toast. It was such an odd thing to do, Mac thought absently. Drown pasta in bright red sauce and plonk it on toast. George loved the stuff; Ursula, if she had to eat anything tinned and tomatoed, preferred beans. Funny, he thought, the random facts you picked up about people.

  He took a seat on the plump blue sofa, aware of the wide-eyed children staring at them from the other end of the room.

  ‘So,’ John Bennet said, ‘what can I do for you?’

  ‘We’re reviewing evidence,’ Mac said, finding his voice. ‘I know you’ve spoken previously to Alec here and other colleagues; I just wondered if you’d mind going over things aga
in.’

  Bennet looked slightly taken aback, then recovered himself. ‘No, not at all, but I don’t think there is anything I can add. I went out at lunchtime on Wednesday last. Well, actually it was the Wednesday before last now, wasn’t it?’ he laughed, suddenly slightly nervous, as though he felt he might be taking a test. ‘I take sandwiches two or three times a week, but Wednesday I usually go to the little shop on the corner. It’s become a bit of a habit, I suppose. Friday too, most Fridays anyway.’

  ‘Why Wednesday?’ Mac wanted to know.

  ‘Why? Oh I see, well, Millie has a little job – she works Wednesday mornings, Thursday afternoons and sometimes Fridays. The local chemist shop. Occasionally she’ll cover other days too, but her hours are nine till two on Wednesday, two till six on Thursday and, as I say, sometimes on a Friday. Oh and evenings when it’s their turn on the rota.’

  ‘Rota?’

  ‘For late opening. All the local chemists are on a rota. Emergencies, you know: people trying to buy paracetamol at eleven o’clock at night, I suppose.’ He laughed nervously. Millie arrived with Alec’s coffee. ‘Ah, I was telling them about your job. About why I don’t take a pack-up on Wednesdays.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t get time on Wednesdays, not getting the girls to school and me to work and all the breakfast things tidied away before I go. I can’t bear the thought of coming back to it all at lunchtime.’

  ‘Right,’ Alec said. ‘Well, I suppose that’s . . . Right then.’

  Mac tried not to smile. ‘And this has been the arrangement for . . . how long?’

  ‘Oh, just this past year,’ Millie said. ‘Just since I had this job.’

  ‘And this Wednesday when you saw Peel?’ Mac could see Alec begin to frown, knew he’d picked up the same detail as Mac.

  ‘Oh,’ John Bennet said, ‘well, as I told you all before, I was coming out of the cob shop and I saw him hurrying down the road. I knew it was Thomas – in fact, I almost called out to him and then I remembered, you know, that he wasn’t the Thomas I used to work with any more, not after . . . well, you know.’